We had a great time with many, many innkeepers, both Acorn IS and NON-Acorn IS customers alike, on our FFA (Free For All) Webinar yesterday! Here are a few comments from the session:

“…Very well done”“Thanks so much. I will highly recommend your webinars.”“I fully enjoyed the content and so appreciate Lisa sharing her knowledge.”

One question that continues to come up on these Webinars is what is the best Blogging Product? WordPress or Blogger? The attendees on the call have learned and now know that either “TOOL” (WordPress or Blogger) will work properly as long as it’s…

A) installed correctly for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)B) the Blog writer has been taught how to write a great Blog post (content, links, titles, etc.)

I’m constantly watching for any comparison on an Innkeeper’s Google Blogger Post vs. an Innkeeper’s WordPress Post and one of those comparisons dropped into my lap this morning via a Google Alert.

You can see from the snapshot information below, that one innkeeper has chosen Google Blogger and the other WordPress. Look for the ICONS to know which is which.

And though they are in different cities and states, the WEEKEND | ROMANTIC | GETAWAY words in these phrases tie these two posts with somewhat SIMILAR content.

The VOLUME of the search phrases are also somewhat SIMILAR. (Remember, the higher volume of use a phrase has, the harder it is to get really high organic placement for that phrase).

As you can see, both Blogger and WordPress are relatively similar in PLACEMENT for their various phrases. And page 5 #1 or page 8 # 4 is not to be construed as “High Placement”, only that this is where I located these posts for the phrases listed.

Keep in mind the discussion from yesterday’s FFA Webinar regarding Google Personalization, and how placement will alter based on your COOKIE information if you ARE NOT LOGGED INTO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT, or will alter based on your preferences IF YOU ARE LOGGED INTO YOUR GOOGLE ACCOUNT.

For this test, I logged out of my Google Account and deleted all my COOKIE information, so I’d have as clean a test a possible. And the results are below.

Some things to note. There are over 200 things that Google considers in ranking any Web Page Post, Blog Post, etc. I am not trying to say one of these is better than the other. That is NOT the purpose of this exercise. The purpose of this exercise is to show that both Google Blogger and WordPress have the opportunity to place in the Search Engines in a similar way as long as A) and B) above have been achieved.

I’ve yet to see any PROOF that one product is truly able to out perform the other for basic Innkeeper Blog SEO (IE: Using a Blog to build links, add pages and list in the search engines for the chosen phrases). It’s simply impossible to do an Apple to Apple comparison. But we continue to search and evaluate the results as we see posts that have things in common, even though they are written with the 2 different products (WordPress vs. Blogger).

So – the choice of WordPress vs. Blogger is up to the Innkeeper.

If you are a technical innkeeper, love bells and whistles, and are ok with additional Maintenance to upkeep the Security patches for WordPress, then Go for it! (Patches tend to be published every few weeks and you MUST make sure your Hosting Company keeps you up to date, otherwise you risk getting a virus on your Blog and the Server where it resides. And remember, Automatic Updates aren’t always “Automatic”!) Once you make sure all the Plugins are in place for great SEO and you write a great post, it will work for placement!

But, if you are an Innkeeper that isn’t overly technical, who wants to keep the cost down, and needs something that is easy to maintain, Blogger is a great choice also. And, if you start with Blogger and feel you’ve out-grown it and want to move to WordPress, the conversion tools are available to do so.

Final Note – As you look at these 2 examples, notice that the Google Blogger post is 1 year old, the other is only a few hours old (which you would think would carry more weight seeing that it is totally new and fresh content which is what Google is all about these days!). The Blogger post is from an Acorn IS customer that posted this on their BLOGSPOT blog long before they became an Acorn IS customer. When they transfered to Acorn IS, we connected their Blogspot Blog to their site using a Sub-Domain.

This customer built this Google Blogger Blog totally on their own (No Cost) from an existing template.

Remember, Google doesn’t care what your blog LOOKS like, they only care about the value of it’s content. Finally, we are in the process of assisting this customer with their SEO settings that have been in place for over 1 year, now that they are with Acorn, we will refine that even more for even better placement on new posts.